MANKATO — White guy, black guy share an elevator at work. Black guy says his son just got a college scholarship at Purdue.

“What sport does he play?” white guy says before being told it was actually an academic scholarship.

This foot-in-mouth moment wasn’t real life, merely a skit performed during a workplace diversity seminar organized Thursday by the Southern Minnesota Area Human Resources Association at the Verizon Wireless Center.

The lawyer who helped organize the event and narrated the skits, Judith Langevin of the law firm Gray Plant Moody, told the crowd not to assume this sort of blatant racial prejudice doesn’t exist.

“The people of color we interviewed say this is no exaggeration,” she said.

It wasn’t like the white guy meant to cause offense, and if he were real he likely wouldn’t think of himself as a racist person. Just trying to make conversation.

It was, Langevin said, another case of “equal-opportunity arrogance.”

Human beings, she said, simply have a tendency to hang around people who are like us. And until the workplace is so diverse that “us” doesn’t exist, we have to think about how our behavior affects people who aren’t like us.

People like us, incidentally, would be a good way for Langevin to describe the audience itself — the well over 100 attendees were largely middle-aged, mostly women and almost all white (there were three African-Americans, including facilitator Bukata Hayes).

Equal opportunity is the law. Minnesota law mandates an equal playing field for workers of different genders, ages, races, national origins, religions, disabilities and sexual orientations.

But having a workplace where different employees mesh well allows that company to take advantage of a broad range of ideas, not just avoid lawsuits.

There are, she acknowledges, some gray areas.

Take the skit where a gay employee complains about a female coworker preaching Christianity to him at work.

The boss sailed the dangerous passage between forbidding his employee from, say, bringing a Bible to work (such a demand would probably be illegal) and allowing proselytizing at work (also potentially illegal). In the end, the woman said she’ll try to tone it down in the future.

Another gray area raised by an audience member: Some Muslim workers at a factory requested part of the morning off on the last day of Ramadan. Such a request, if granted, could upset other workers who wouldn’t get that allowance.

One solution, an audience member said, was a “floating holiday” concept used by her company.

Disability and age can be other on-the-job minefields.

The employee must be able to perform the essential functions of the job, Langevin said, and the company must make a reasonable accommodation to help them do so.

What’s not legal, she said, is to use our preconceptions as a substitute for an employee’s abilities. Forced retirement is typically illegal, but age discrimination works both ways.

“It’s just as unlawful to say a person won’t hire a 19-year-old because (they) are certain he isn’t mature,” Langevin said.

In one of the more awkward skits, a female project manager tiptoes gingerly around the performance issues of a black architect. She wants to tell him to work faster, but doesn’t want him to think that racial prejudice is the real problem. He’s not lazy, she wants to say, but she’d like a sped-up timeline for this project.

It’s important, Langevin said, for managers to not use an employee’s race, gender, etc., as an excuse not to discipline them. Fear of conflict, she said, “is definitely an issue in Minnesota.”

Look at it from the employee’s perspective. Let’s say you’re fired and told something has “always” been an issue but this is the first time you’re hearing of it. That will probably make you think that the supposed offense is just a pretext and your race, age or something else is the real reason.

Avoiding workplace conflict around issues like national orientation, religion and ethnicity is hard stuff.

So how does the St. Paul-based acting group, Theatre at Work, avoid the kind of awkward issues it acts out on stage?

Artistic director and actor Phil Kilbourne says they talk to each other often and have a good sense of trust.

“Issues happen when you don’t communicate,” he said.

And there are certain parts of each other’s life that you just won’t understand, Kilbourne said.

“That’s OK.”

Mankato human resources consultant Ramona Morgan says she goes back to the golden rule. It’s better to focus on a respectful workplace, she said, not just avoiding lawsuits.

That involves honesty. It helps to use a phrase like a “free zone” or “off the record” to get to the bottom of something.

It also helps to not immediately get defensive if you feel aggrieved.

One time, while being introduced as a new member in the safety committee at a factory, she got the greeting “Where’s your pink hard hat?”

It would have been easy to get mad, but she just dismissed it and talked about her qualifications, and earned a grudging tolerance, at the very least.